Reticulated Ramblings

15,000 hits on Doug’s Darkworld! It took years for my nearly defunct cat web site to rack up that many hits. I guess people blowing each other up is more popular than cats, that pretty much sums up what is wrong with the world in a nutshell. As always I appreciate my readers, welcome comments, and just in general have nothing but good to say about the blogosphere and its denizens.

Speaking of blowing people up, apparently an attack on Iraq’s top cleric was foiled in a major battle over the past few days. Being my usual skeptical self, I wonder how they know what the attackers planned before the dust has even settled. I also wonder why the US army was needed to defend Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, I mean, the Iraqi government is a Shiite government, their army isn’t even capable of driving off an attack by a few hundred militants on their most revered figure? The result will be even more retaliation by Shiite death squads on their Sunni neighbours. Just like Vietnam, this is just another battle won on the road to defeat. How Americans got the caveman idea that all you needed to do to win a war was to win all the battles is beyond me. No, wait, it’s a Hollywood idea, the same people who convinced Americans that winning wars was simply a matter of whose cheering section was the loudest. Actually, winning a war requires sound strategy, tactics, and foreign policy. Plus it’s important to only get involved in wars that can be won, again, Hollywood has led us astray there too.

And if there wasn’t enough fun in Iraq now, Turkey is apparently “secretly” considering occupying northern Iraq. I’m sure the Kurds, who have the closest thing they have to a nation in centuries, will just be thrilled with that idea. That’s the problem with having a planet with over 5000 ethic groups and only 300 odd governments: 4700 ethnic groups are S.O.L. The Kurds are near the top of the list of stateless peoples, so this could get interesting. And by interesting, I mean bloody.

News out of Iran indicates that their primitive nuclear program is in shambles and is years away from being capable of producing the nuclear material needed to build nuclear weapons. Iranian President Ahmadinejad is under increasing domestic pressure for his inept diplomacy and handling of the economy. None of which makes any difference in Washington, where policy is based on the propaganda that Iran is trying to “dominate” the region. The only people trying to dominate the region are the same people who have dominated the region for decades, the USA and Israel. And they were doing a decent job of it until Bush came along with his cowboy dreams of reshaping the region by force of arms. My prediction is that Iran will halt uranium enrichment just before the deadline, and Bush will simply add a list of new non-negotiable demands. Hey, this kind of “diplomacy” got Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, how can it fail?

Moving right along, in today’s end times news, a duck has risen from the dead…again. A twelve year old boy is having a sex change, (clearly puberty isn’t what it used to be.) A 100 pound chunk of ice fell from the sky and smashed a car. And finally, a man in China married himself to express his dissatisfaction with reality. If he gets divorced, will he have to pay himself alimony? I’m dissatisfied with reality too, but I think beer works a lot better than marrying myself ever would.

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It is not being used for profit and it is an historically important image.)